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Dondero was born on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan, which has since become part of Detroit. His father was an immigrant from Italy and his mother was an immigrant from Germany. He served as the village clerk of Royal Oak, Michigan in 1905 and 1906, as town treasurer in 1907 and 1908, and as village assessor in 1909. He graduated from the Detroit College of Law in 1910, was admitted to the bar, and started a practice in Royal Oak the same year. He was village attorney, 1911–1921 and assistant prosecuting attorney for Oakland County in 1918 and 1919. He was mayor of Royal Oak in 1921 and 1922 and a member of the board of education, 1910-1928.

A sympathiser with McCarthyism,[1] Dondero claimed American liberals had been responsible for a "whitewash" over the Amerasia affair. In 1947, Dondero tried to block the trial of IG Farben executives for war crimes at Nuremberg by withholding funding for the prosecution team before indictments could be handed down.[2]

Dondero was most notable for mounting an attack on modern art, which he claimed to be inspired by Communism. He asserted that "Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder... Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule... Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms".[3] In 1952, Dondero went so far as to tell Congress that modern art was, in fact, a conspiracy by Moscow to spread communism in the United States.[4] This speech won him the International Fine Arts Council's Gold Medal of Honor for "dedicated service to American Art."[5] When art critic Emily Genauer (future winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism) interviewed Dondero in the mid-1950s he stated "modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, our material progress. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government and those who promote it are our enemies."[6] When Genauer pointed out the resemblance between his views and those of the Stalinist Communists he despised, Dondero was so enraged that he arranged to have her fired from her job at the New York Herald Tribune.[6]

^The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. Mccarthy and the Senate By Robert Griffith, states Dondero shared McCarthy's strong anti-communism and worked with McCarthy in 1950 in a campaign against the Truman administration(pgs.,37, 97).